


undone

by Aquaphobe



Series: un-titled [5]
Category: South Park
Genre: Awkwardness, Blonde Squad, Blood and Gore, Boys Being Boys, Canonical Character Death, Eventual Romance, Eventual Smut, Eventual Spoilers for Unresolved, Fluff and Angst, Growing Up, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Or don't, Psychological Trauma, Slow Burn, So Maybe Read that First, Stupidity, Underage Drinking, Underage Drug Use, can be read as a standalone
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-06
Updated: 2019-02-05
Packaged: 2019-10-05 04:52:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17318432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aquaphobe/pseuds/Aquaphobe
Summary: Every single person – every living thing on Earth – eventually has to die.Kenny McCormick is, unfortunately, no exception to that rule.There's a difference between Kenny and normal people, though. Normal people, people like his classmates and his parents and his baby sister Karen, will only have to die once. It may be slow, it may be painful, but once it's done, it's over. For good.(Kaput.)Turns out, that isn't always the case.





	1. after life

**Author's Note:**

> (i said to myself, i said, 'aqua, okay, don't be an idiot. don't post this yet. you were going to wait until _unfounded_ was finished, and _unresolved_ was a little further along. don't do anything hasty.' and then i promptly ignored that advice and came over here to post this anyway :'D)
> 
>  **SO!! what you need to know about this fic:**  
>  _undone_ won't really help anyone expand upon the main _un-titled_ series at all (at least, not for many more chapters to come), so i guess you _could_ read it as a standalone. mostly though, it's just something extra for those very few that might be wanting more to read around _unresolved_ , without having to wait for me to start posting the official sequel. ;))

Every single person – every living thing on Earth – eventually has to die.

Kenny McCormick is, unfortunately, no exception to that rule.

There's a difference between Kenny and normal people, though. Normal people, people like his classmates and his parents and his baby sister Karen, will only have to die once. It may be slow, it may be painful, but once it's done, it's over. For good.

(Kaput.)

For the grand majority of humanity, there's no such thing as second chances.

Turns out this isn't  _always_  the case, though.

Occasionally over the course of his lives, Kenny notices that there are other anomalies – other people almost (but not quite) like him.

They're the unforeseen irregularities. They're the odd ones out. They ought to make him feel a little less alone in such a huge the world.

The very first time he finds one, he learns just how wrong that assumption is.

...

Little, blonde Pip Pirrip dies for the first time when they're eight, during a school field trip. He's gone for a few weeks, and then suddenly one day, he's back again. Sat at the very front of the class, dusting off his blazer and blinking in the sunshine cast through the window.

Now, his classmates seem not to notice this. They ignore the oddity of a dead classmate sat among them the same exact way they ignore their teacher. They're awake and unseeing.

But Kenny isn't  _like_  the rest of them. He  _sees_  the glazed look in Pip's blue eyes - the way his attention wanders as Mr Garrison gives them a pop quiz on his favorite season of  _Friends_. Every now and then Pip looks down at himself as if he's just remembered he exists, and he begins to shake – Kenny can see it all the way across the room.

It shouldn't make any sense, he thinks. One day Pip was dead, gone forever; now, he isn't. This isn't usually the way things work.

Especially not since Kenny had actually spotted him on his last trip Below Ground. He'd looked… settled in, really. Definitely dead. (Then again, that  _does_  tend to be one of the requirements in order for humans to be granted entry to the Afterlife.)

No, this whole situation seems pretty abnormal.

So he approaches doe-eyed Pip on the playground at recess – slips away while the other boys are arguing over teams for a game of soccer – and he sits down beside him in the frosty grass. Pip's busy sinking his fingers into the snow, watching them go first bright pink and then, after a fashion, white as death itself. There's something still and reverent in the other little boy's expression, something Kenny recognizes.

Sometimes he gets that way himself. Life is so cold and bright and sharp after the steadiness of death. So fleeting and fractured that it's painful. Overwhelming.

Those are big thoughts for young minds to absorb though, and as always when he starts thinking this way, he can feel his mind start to tilt and spin, severed down the very middle – stuck in two dimensional planes all at once. A little like he's trying to balance on two very differently sized legs.

Feeling kind of nervous and really not wanting to have this conversation twice, he tugs the edge of his parker hood loose and breathes in icy, peppery air. (Easier to hear his voice, this way.) "Yo, Pip," he says, waving a small hand and stretching out his short legs so his boots sink into an untouched patch of snow.

Pip yanks his hands up off of the ground and clutches them to his chest as though they've been burned. "O-oh, hello there, Kenneth," he says, high voice warbling like the little birds that nest in the evergreens during the springtime.

"Welcome back," Kenny says as he flops backwards into the crunchy snow and the lumpy ground. Forces himself to seem coolheaded. "How was your trip?"

"M-my trip? Golly, well— that is to say, it was... how should I put this...?"

"You died."

Nearly jumping out of his skin, Pip spins his body around to stare down at him. "E-e-excuse me?"

"You died," Kenny repeats with a shrug, "so I'm guessing it started out pretty painful. Then, Hell... didn't I see you there last week? You were in First District, weren't you? So you had it pretty cosy, I'd say."

Something hot and angry twists up Pip's pretty face, lip curling back in a snarl. "It most certainly was not _cosy_." He snaps the words. "They— they  _tortured me_. For  _days_."

Kenny snorts. Rolls his eyes. "As far as you know, it was only a few minutes." Or months. Or decades. Time is kinda subjective in the Abyss – Kenny thinks that's part of the reason he...  _thinks_  differently to the other kids. "When  _I_  saw you down there, you were walking along the street with some hot blonde chick."

Eyes glazing over, Pip's shoulders settle back down from where he'd hunched them. His snarl eases into a small frown. "I- I think I was..." Shakes his head and sighs. "I... don't remember it clearly. I know that I died and that when I was there I... I  _saw_  things, but... how? How do you know?"

"Practice," he says simply. Grins a sharp sort of grin that doesn't reach his eyes. "Dude, it's cool. I die all the time."

This seems to be a shocking thing to admit to. Pip looks faint. "Wh-what?"

"Never noticed before, huh?" Kenny isn't surprised. (A little hurt, maybe. But then, he always is.) "Don't worry, that's pretty normal. Especially once things get back to how they usually are."

Apparently, this isn't the right thing to say either. "Oh— well, that's simply  _absurd_. I would  _recall_  it if you— how could anyone forget? Everything— I was just  _there_ — just a day or so ago…"

"But the longer you're stuck back here, the harder it becomes to remember the details?" He huffs a laugh. It rattles through him. "Yeah, that happens sometimes, after these things. I think we aren't really  _built_  to keep coming back. That's why people— forget. When bad things happen."

"I don't think I shall ever forget," Pip says, clutching both his hands into the front of his blazer. His tie goes wonky. "Certainly not the dying part. Not how it happened."

"You won't," Kenny says. Blinks past the memories that are trying to churn themselves up, with the efficiency of someone who's been doing it for as long as they've existed. He's pretty much a professional when it comes to suppressing painful thoughts. "That'll stay as clear as the day it happened, for you. Hell will get blurry after a while, but it'll all come back to you when you go there again." And Kenny would bet on his life – his  _lives_  – that Pip Pirrip will visit more than once. Maybe next time, it'll be a permanent move. "But if you're anything like me, then everyone else—" he waves a hand at the schoolmates, running and screaming and playing all around them, oblivious to the greater mysteries of the universe, "—they've all forgotten. Every single one of them. They'll never even know it happened." He tries not to feel too bitter about that.

When he looks back at other boy, Pip is staring at him in an odd sort of way. It takes a few long minutes of looking at each other for Kenny to work out what's wrong.

One huge, glassy teardrop tips over the edge of Pip's eyelashes and rolls all the way down his cheek to his chin.

Kenny's eyes widen in horror. So do the English boy's.

"Fuck," says Kenny, scrambling up onto his knees and then freezing, stuck somewhere between running away or reaching out to pat his back. (He  _hates_  it when people cry over him.)

"Oh— golly gosh, oh dear— I— heaven alone knows what's—" the other boy's saying as Kenny flounders, patting at his face with his still-pink hands and sniffing loudly. When more tears escape in the wake of the first, Pip's very proper posture disappears. He slumps over his own lap, weird hat flopping off his head into the muddy snow and hair falling like a curtain around his face. "I— I'm ss-so ss-sorry, dear chap. I have  _no idea_ —"

Sighing and looking around to make sure this weirdness hasn't been spotted (Kyle and Cartman have started kicking the shit out of each other over by the goal posts, so everyone's beginning to gather round and cheer them on), he settles his small hand on his classmate's shoulder. "S'fine," he says. "Everyone dies. One way or another, we all end up in Hell." Ponders this. "Or Heaven," he corrects. "If you're Mormon."

"Yes –  _hic_  – well." A loud  _shplrrrt_  as Pip dispels half his nasal cavity into a handkerchief he's seemingly pulled out of thin air. It's got tiny pink flowers embroidered along the borders, some distracted part of Kenny notes. "People don't— don't usually die e-enough times to— to be able to work that sort of thing  _out_ , Kenneth, do they?"

His hand stops patting. Slowly, Kenny pulls away. His mind feels very still. "What."

"I-I can't i-imag-ine how lonely it must be," Pip says through a fresh onslaught of sobbing. "You poor— you poor, sweet fellow."

That... isn't right. "Everyone dies," he repeats. His voice catches in his throat. "Everyone. For good."

Everyone except me, he thinks.

"Yes, well," Pip says, dabbing the corner of his flowery hanky delicately against his eyes, "a-at least there's that, hm?"

Neither boy looks convinced.

Kenny stumbles to his feet and walks away before he has the chance to punch Pip in the face.

...

A few days later, he's hit by the school bus.

His skull concaves upon impact. His neck snaps. His insides gush out of his body in a tidal wave.

When he wakes up at home in his bed, he's unmarked. Unscarred.

The bus ride is busy. Piercingly loud voices, movements so fast they make his head hurt. Everything feels raw.

He walks down the hallway on perfectly  _un_ broken legs and stops, briefly, when he spots a familiar blonde head across the corridor.

Upon noticing Kenny watching, Pip just smiles at him blankly over his shoulder like he isn't sure why he's being stared at. Like he's struggling to remember who exactly Kenny is. It's the same, vague expression that everyone wears around him when he first comes back.

Kenny's heart sinks. He pulls the chords on his hood tighter and shoves his hands in his pocket when the other boy turns away, fetching another book from his open locker.

No greeting.

No look of recognition.

He doesn't need any further evidence to know that their conversation has already been forgotten. He is an expert in these things, after all. The  _only_  expert.

(It just... might have been nice, not to be so alone.)


	2. (smoke and mirrors)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hoo boi okay, soooo **big warnings** for this chapter, but also for the whole story:  
> blood and gore and some pretty gross imagery. and also, in good old Aquaphobe fashion, a nice lil dose of mystery/confusion.
> 
> sorry...?

Twenty-one years old, and dead again.

Kenny knows as much the second he lifts his head to peer across the cloudy, foggy white air of the bar. The stink of ash and charred meat, stale sweat and spilt beer surround him in a comforting cloak of surreality. Hushed voices and rustling clothes are overlaid by a medley of clinking bottles, scraping stools and shuffling feet. The thrum of an electric guitar plays low through the overhead speakers, and the lamps cast a soft red hue over the room, bouncing off the carved out walls and the slick grey floor.

There's a long pause – a floundering confusion as he peers down at his hands and struggles to remember what had happened in order for him to wake up here. These days, it's getting harder to recall his deaths, or his lives, or who he even is. Every transition from the living world to Hell makes it more difficult for him to reconcile with the different parts of himself. Nothing's as it seems, and the blankness of the Void lingers around him, pressing into the splits in his soul and making them wider.

Being dead used to be so straightforward – so  _concrete_. He'd been such a smart-ass, bending the Afterlife to his will and taking his knowledge of death for granted. For all that he'd enjoyed playing God, he'd had no idea what he was doing. As a young adult, he's started figuring out things are never that clean cut, and fucking with fate has its consequences. Kenny, despite his supposed immortality, is not immune to them.

For years he's pushed death too far, and now the Nothingness is pushing back.

(It's all smoke and mirrors, here.)

Shaking off those morbid thoughts, he turns his attention back to himself.

His skin is cold and clammy, even in the stifling heat of the bar, and the fabric of his sweatpants sticks to him like a second skin. He pulls the material away from his thigh with his forefinger and his thumb, and it squelches unappealingly. It's hard to tell in this lighting, but the legs of his orange pants look darker than usual. Water? Mud? Blood? What…

Kenny, not wanting to think on it too hard, moves on to the next mystery.

He runs his hands over his sides, taking a fuzzy-headed inventory, and pauses. Pressing fingers against the ridges of his ribs, something floats to the surface – a memory of crunching bone and air filling up his chest cavity like a balloon fit to burst. He's pretty sure his ribs... had splintered inwards. Maybe he'd bust a lung. Takes a steadying breath.

The more that he thinks on it, the more certain he is that a whole lot of his bones had broken, actually. They'd snapped like twigs under the heel of a walking boot. His arms and legs begin to ache in sharp aftershocks, and his entire chest throbs in time to his heartbeat.

There's a growing suspicion in him that he'd hit his head on something hard since even now, his ears ring. Had he brained himself on a rock? That'd at least explain why he feels like he's been concussed.

It takes a moment of consideration, but something foggy and half-formed rises to the forefront of his mind. Skips and gaps and faded colors, like a clip from some stranger's home videos.

(He'd  _told them_  that trying to jump into an inflatable kids pool from a second story window was a bad idea, but that was before they'd all gotten high and drunk.)

With a shake of his head and a very sober sense of self-disappointment, the young man narrows his eyes and turns his attention away from his pounding skull. Instead he studies the other occupants of the room for the first time. Mostly, the place is taken up by winged, horned, or otherwise fairly run-of-the-mill demons. The majority of them are skulking in the shadowy corners, nursing their beers and talking in low, rasping tones. A small group of cloaked overlords are playing a game of pool on the other side of the room, their piercing wails muffles and their game sombre aside from the occasional snapping of fangs. There are only a handful of other humans in the bar, including the headless barman, the front of his very fancy velvet waistcoat soaked through liberally with his own blood. His head sits on a shelf holding a huge variety of liquors against the back wall and seems to be dictating what the rest of him does without issue. (It's kind of fascinating, how gracefully his disconnected body moves.)

Blinking, he looks away.

Kenny knows after just a few short moments that he's lucked out, this time – has avoided the lines and the torture pits, and has woken up right inside First District. Or maybe Second at a push. One of the benefits of dying a lot is that he's a fairly regular visitor, so he mostly gets to skip straight past the entry points. He was never one hundred percent sure, but he's always suspected that he had his friendship with the big, flaming gay ruler himself to thank for it. Saving the world and giving relationship advice to the Prince of Darkness as a child came with some unexpected perks.

Which, he thinks, is all well and good, but this situation still makes very little sense. Why is he wet? How did he get such a great table? Who got him the glass of beer he's just spotted in front of him, or the pack of American Spirits sat beside it. His head spins, even as he looks around and thinks: did I black out? How long have I been here? What the fuck is going on? Unfortunately, no answers are readily forthcoming, and no one seems to have noticed him sat over here by himself.

Somewhat bemused by this turn of events, he reaches out and runs his finger through the misty condensation on the side of the glass. Tiny droplets gather together, beading up and dripping onto the sticky table top below. Watching, he recalls the taste of sourness and metal on his tongue, numbness freezing up his limbs and  _burning_  until he can't fight against the imagined weight of it.

No, he thinks. It… hadn't been the pool that had killed him. Not this most recent death. That must have been some time back, now.  _This_  death…

Foaming, choking, every organ in his body trying to heave itself up and out of his mouth. He hadn't been able to  _breathe_.

Had it been... the rat poison? This memory is clearer than the last – feels more recent – and he grips at it, thinking yeah, okay, that would explain the damp clothing too.  _And_  the phantom agony of locking muscles, limbs feeling like they're shattering from the inside out. He's been poisoned more than a few different ways over the years, and every single time it's an excruciatingly new experience.

(They'd been camping out of town – in the Rockies, actually – and Clyde had dared him to down the mysterious black bottle they'd found in the back of Jimbo's borrowed van for twenty dollars. Stan, however drunk he was, had tried to warn him against it. But money was money, and Kenny hadn't listened.)

To chase away the taste of his own insides from where they've been burned forever into his tongue, he takes hold of his drink and throws back a few good mouthfuls. Whatever it is, it's stronger than human beer. Dry, dusty and hot as Hell itself. Closer to chilli tequila than beer, really. It burns all the way down his throat to his stomach, where it sits and smoulders. Kenny splutters in appreciation and licks the foam from his lips with the tip of his tongue.

It's only as he's setting the half empty glass back down that a large, burning hand lands like an iron brand on his bare shoulder—

Wait. Hold on a second.

Jolting, he turns around, first to glance in shock at his naked, pale-ass arms, (why the  _fuck_  is he only wearing his wife-beater? And for that matter, why is he only  _now_  noticing?) and then up at his unexpected company.

Or rather, he thinks as he takes in the sharp features - the long, elfish nose and ears, and the dark mop of hair – my host.

Damien Thorn. Satan's bastard son. Currently holding a Bloody Mary. (Because, of course.)

"Yo," Kenny says after a moment, recovering from his surprise. His voice is clear, unobstructed by the thick polyester scarf he usually covers his lower face with, or the fact his throat feels like it should still be raw from choking. He runs his tongue over crooked teeth. "What's up, my man?"

"Foolish mortal," the other young man says with a roll of his eyes. "Who else would dare greet me in such an impertinent manner as this?"

"Yeah, yeah, sit your bony gay ass down already." With a shrug and a wide, toothy grin, Kenny turns back to his drink and shoves out a wet, socked foot to nudge the stool away from the other side of the table. It scrapes. Loudly. "And stop with all the fancy talk. You're gonna give me hives."

Damien makes an inelegant grunt as he slumps down into his seat, unnaturally red eyes glowing in the gloom. He looks, Kenny finds himself thinking, like some cheaply CGI'd baddie from a shitty, low-budget vampire movie. Like Twilight, only worse. "Joy. I see you're as painfully informal as ever."

Grinning and leaning back on his stool, Kenny tilts his head to one side. "Formalities are for the fearful."

"The  _sensible_ , I think you mean." Demon-boy slurps up his cocktail through a little pink straw and gives him a hard look.

The blonde waves a dismissive hand. "Same difference." He finds his eyes drawn back to Damien's beverage as he takes another noisy sip. "Y'know, you'd probably be tortured if the human girls caught you drinking through  _that_  thing. Using plastic's considered a cardinal sin, these—days—"

It's hard to finish the sentence, when the sudden feeling of a small, cylindrical object piercing through his right eye makes his grasp desperately at his face.

Clearer. It's clearer. Closer.  _Sharper_  than the others.

(Not rat poison;  _darts_. Cartman had been inspired by a dream of them starting up their own rigged gambling pool, and somehow before long that had entailed people throwing pointy objects at each other's heads in order to up their stakes. Naturally Kenny had been the first and, hopefully, only fatality. No one wanted to be impaled through the eye socket and directly into their frontal lobe by something longer than a knitting needle.)

"Fucking dumbass. Man, s'like I don't learn," he says, voice hoarse. He presses the heel of his palm into the phantom throbbing of his eye socket, and shakes.

Once he's steady again, he reaches for the smokes with his free hand. Shuffles the pack until the lid pops off and he can hook one out. He nearly drops it on its way to his mouth.

There's a deafening silence from the other end of the table, and it takes long moments for Kenny to notice that Damien's watching him through narrowed eyes.

Cigarette dangling from his lips and previous conversation on plastic products and murderous millennials forgotten, he mumbles out, "Light me up?"

Obliging, Damien leans across the table, snaps his fingers and hovers a tiny flame beneath the American Spirit. It catches instantly in the arid heat of the bar.

Goosebumps rise along the length of the blonde's bare arms and he shudders, sucking in a glorious mouthful of bitter, ashy smoke. The head rush is instant.

"Phillip was right," Damien says in a slow drawl that sets Kenny's teeth on edge. There's a note of cruel amusement to it. "You're getting...  _worse_."

Fighting down his gut reaction to snarl or curse, Kenny just takes another, slower drag and lets his eyes slip shut. The blonde lounges in the lightheaded rush and eases himself out of his defensiveness. He doesn't need to hear what he already knows, but he can at least play it cool. When he finally responds, his voice is indifferent. "The fuck you on about? Your boy's been chatting shit."

There's a definite chuckle across from him – the sort of low, growling sound that should make Kenny quiver with fear. "Were you anyone else, I'd flay you down to your bones for suggesting that my  _boy_  is a liar."

Kenny shrugs, still so caught up in the afterimage of collapsing into a puddle of his own blood, vomit and eye-juices that he barely registers the implicit threat in that statement. "Whatever, dude. At least you're not denying it anymore. S'only taken you both a small eternity."

Apparently not deigning that worthy of further comment, Damien says instead, "What stupidity was it that brought you back to my father's kingdom this time then, Kenneth?"

He opens his mouth to answer that 'stupidity' barely covers it, when his vision goes blurry, and every muscle locks tight. Damien's eyes spark like embers into his, and the fingers of the demon's free hand  _twist_ _in the air_. There's a raking pain - rusted nails being dragged through his skull, ragged razors slicing into him, a thousand fishing hooks tearing,  _searing_.

His mouth opens and closes like a land-bound fish. Tendrils of smoke rise out of mouth and curl around his face, and his hand reflexively drops the cigarette onto the tabletop.

The torturous pain cuts through his hazy memories, through his recalled deaths, and embeds itself in something new. Something  _fresh_.

And just like that, he knows. Perfect, blinding clarity.

Not swimming pools. Not rat poison. Not darts, either.

A bridge.

He'd been- he'd-

(He'd held onto the metal support beam with his bare fingers, socked feet on the railing and jacket discarded somewhere halfway down the street. It was snowing, and the water below had churned up into something straight out of the oil paintings in the gallery he'd been forced to visit over a month earlier. Kenny had stared down into the unholy canvas of blues and greys and blacks, and he'd stepped forwards. Had let his numb fingers slip away from the metal. It was necessary, he'd told himself, even as he'd plummeted towards the river. But he'd been wrong. Behind him –  _too late, too late_  – there had been a raw, gut-wrenching scream that had  _changed everything_ —)

Kenny heaves, stomach contracting. His throat closes around imagined water, and he's choking. He's drowning.

Before he knows what's happening, his whole body careens to the left, and he slips from the seat onto the hard, damp floor with a deafening  _crash_ , dragging his glass and his stool down with him.

His sides throb, his head pounds, the room spins.

All he's capable of doing is trying to convince his lungs that they're not drowning – to convince his locked muscles they're not frozen at his sides, that his bones didn't break upon impact – but it takes frighteningly long minutes of inaction to get anywhere with it.

Damien, the undead douchebag, stays exactly where he is. Inside  _and_  out.

"Ah, noble as ever, I see," comes the smooth voice of his supposed friend, after forcing his way inside of Kenny's skull and tearing through his thoughts. He feels  _violated_.

"G-get—" Kenny curls in on himself, hacking hard enough that his ears ring. "Get outta my head, you— you ass munching bastard."

To his credit (as if he's truly due that much), Damien withdraws. The indescribable agony of being mentally probed disappears with him.

By slow increments, the sensation of being dragged to his death down an icy river eases away and he's left breathless on the floor, tired to the bone and drenched in fresh sweat. His eyes slip shut, and he wonders if he can't just stay there, cheek pressed against the hot stone forever. It seems a fitting punishment.

A boot nudges him in the side of the head. "You look even more idiotic than usual. So get up."

With a grunt, he shoves the boot away from him and pulls himself up again – first to his elbows, then to his knees, and finally onto his feet. The bar wobbles and sways for long moments after he's righted himself, gripping the side of the table. Once it stops, he retrieves his stool from where it'd fallen and sinks back down onto it. His stomach and chest ache with their efforts to choke up water that isn't there. "Dude, you're a total asshole." Considers that even though he  _is_  talking to the only son of Lucifer, the guy's meant to be a friend. " _And_  you're pretty shit at showing sympathy," he adds as an afterthought.

"You did that to yourself – it was  _your_  choice to jump. I was merely assisting in your self-reflection." Kenny looks at Damien – and the cigarette perched between long, clawed fingers – and he can't even find it in himself to be pissed that the guy took his smoke. (Klepto bastard.)

"Whatever, man." There's not enough energy left in him to debate what had happened to bring him here. It wasn't like he'd had much of a choice in the matter; he'd hardly woken up that morning and gone, 'Oh, y'know what  _I_  fucking fancy doing today?  _Dying_.' Sometimes, things like that have to happen though. It would've been worse waiting and not knowing. It would've driven them  _both_  mad. "It was necessary."

At least now he'll know. Now, no matter what happens, he'll have his answer.

(His heart aches at the thought of his suspicions being correct.)

"You are, without a doubt, one of the most tragically dunderheaded creatures I have ever had the displeasure of meeting," Damien says with another roll of his eyes. Kenny barely pays him any mind. The glass, which he had forgotten to fetch when he'd stood, rises from the floor and sets itself down on the table at a wave of demon-boy's hand. "Do you  _enjoy_  existing in a constant state of disappointment?"

Good question, to which the immediate answer would seem like a resounding  _yes_. Yes, he definitely enjoys making himself irrefutably miserable. He likes making the few people he actually cares for miserable too, from the looks of things.

(And maybe he  _had_  been a little fucked up when he'd decided to dive off the bridge into sub-zero water – maybe he had been having a bit of an off day – but really, he wouldn't have done it if he'd thought he might be followed. He wouldn't have done it if he thought that he might be  _seen_. Now, that scream will echo on an endless loop through his head for the rest of eternity. All because he'd lost his rationale.)

Bracing his elbows on the table, Kenny puts his head in his hands and absorbs the knowledge that he's done this to himself. That he's done this to Butters, too.

(He hadn't known that Butters had been  _home to see it._ )

Letting the Void rise up and claim him actually seems pretty appealing, right about now.

But no. Not yet. Not until he has his answers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hate asking for feedback, but hearing what you guys think about this would be a huge help. i can tell already that this story's gonna be tricky to write (and even trickier to understand), so to hear any thoughts you might have on what's going on would be amazing. :'))


	3. beyond the grave

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> takes place S5 E13 (Kenny Dies) to S6 E12 (A Ladder to Heaven) ;Y
> 
> (ahahgdidhdk largely unedited because i'm late for work :'UUU i'll come back later hrfhrhrhf)

Kenny's eight when he decides that slow deaths are the worst kind of all.

They're not awful for the reasons that you might expect, though.

Yeah, sure, it's unpleasant because he has to see the growing understanding in his friends eyes, has to watch his four-year-old sister cry herself senseless at his bedside, but for once he isn't completely alone. There's a finality in their staring, their fake smiles and their pandering. They try so hard to pretend that everything's fine when they all know it isn't, but they're doing that for  _him_. He knows it should hurt him more than it does, but it's... okay. It's okay. Pretending this is new to him, that he's never died before and he's just a normal, scared kid is nice.

( _Selfish_ , a small voice insists. He shuts it down.)

After he's gone through a particularly stressful series of tests, Butters Stotch comes to visit with his mom, Linda, and he hands Kenny a beat up old teddy. It sits on the mattress beside him and keeps him company at night, when the aches and the lethargy and the rattling breaths make him sink back into his pillows and ponder too many grown-up things. He names the teddy Major Boobage, because he knows Butters would be shocked by it, and also because giving it a cheeky name makes him feel less like he might cry out of gratitude.

(Later, Butters will draw him a picture of them together, flying in an airplane and smiling. It's these two gifts that make Kenny pause for the first time. They make him start to look at Leopold 'Butters' Stotch through new eyes.)

Seeing his parents hugging one another, clinging like they're all that's keeping one another going, is maybe one of his favorite memories of them ever. They're sober and supportive. His dad fetches his mom cups of shitty coffee and his mom rolls her husbands joints for him since the tremors from not drinking or using during the day make it impossible for him to even hold the papers. He listens to them bickering over how they're gonna make ends meet with his hospital bills when they think he's sleeping, and he soaks in the way his mom brushes his bangs back from his face, tucking them into his hood, because it's the sweetest touch he thinks he's ever felt.

Even his brother, Kevin, flings himself down on the bottom of Kenny's bed and talks about the latest new on their favorite NASCAR drivers, or this really cool dirty magazine he stole from the corner store. He pretends he doesn't see the redness in Kevin's eyes, or the way his shoulders stay up around his ears. They never really got on since they're both sons in a family where boys are meant to be tough and look after themselves, but they can't help themselves. He does, in those moments, truly feel like his brother might miss him.

He gets a glimpse of a world where for once, he is thought of while he dies – where he gets gifts and cards and love in the last of his time with the few people he actually cares about. Strange people visit him, countless doctors and nurses and charity workers. He gets to write a will (though there's next to nothing to put into it) and lie in a warm hospital bed with regular, reasonably good food to fill his small stomach, and even better painkillers. Sweet mother Mary, the  _painkillers_.

When the illness is so far along that he stops eating and he needs a feeding tube and an oxygen mask – his bed encapsulated in a medley of bland, endless beeps – they give him so many meds he's dancing. He's flying through the air over South Park, listening to snippets of private conversations that jumble themselves together in his head until they're nonsensical. They surround him in soft whispers and sniffles, like layers upon layers of downy blankets. Kenny's senseless mind thinks of these as more gifts, gathering like the others on his nightstand and stuck on the wall over his bed.

In his last, rare moments of lucidity, he wants his friends. He wants them around him to talk with, to tell them everything about his many different lives. He wants to see their worrying turn to relief – to comfort them a little in return.

' _I don't want to die, but if I have to then I want it like this_ ,' he would say to them. ' _It could be the best thing that's ever happened to me. If I die this time, I hope it lasts forever_.'

But all his starved brain and his numb lips can manage as he blinks groggily up into Kyle's face is, "W-where's Stan?"

He can't tell this story more than once. He doesn't have the energy.

"Whe-re's Stan?"

And Kyle's face falls.

"Where's Stan?" He asks it on repeat, until his mind is melted by the next dose of drugs and he returns to his floating above the ward, above the town that he's been trapped in on endless repeats.

He feels free, and it's so easy to forget what he was going to say – to let it go. To let it  _all_  go.

...

Dead again.

He... hadn't even noticed when he'd died. It had just been sleeping and soaring, and then...

Here.

Sitting up surrounded but irate passengers on a delayed descent into the Underworld.

This isn't his usual entry point most times around, but that's fine. Almost every other death's been short and sudden, and he's appeared in the torture pits of Seventh District, or the residential sector of Fourth, or the demon cesspools of Thirteenth. He usually wakes up already inside the barrier of the Underworld, like he's got some kind of a free pass as a regular visitor. He doesn't usually have to endure the journeying down here, though once in a while when he kicks the bucket, the earth will split open around him horror movie style, and his soul will get sucked into a fiery abyss. Another one he's experienced more than once is being dragged down from the gateway of Heaven by a band of fire-spitting Hell spawn, all of the angels looking on, unimpressed. (Kinda humiliating, really.) Point is, Satan likes to keep things fresh for newcomers, and Kenny only rarely has to experience the various means of transportation so when he does, it's generally unexpected. Maybe even  _exciting_.

In comparison, travelling down via a simulated airplane flight seems sort of... banal, but he supposes that if this is a short-term solution to Purgatory, then that's probably the point. Boredom's a seriously underrated form of torture. At least this way, he doesn't have to waste his energy on keeping up with anything overly dramatic or painful. And besides, maybe the fact he's being forced to enter through the check-in points like the regular dead means that this time, something's changed? Maybe the reason this death and this trip into the Afterlife have been different so far is because... it's permanent?

(Kenny tries hard not to think of that. Getting his hopes up now will only hurt if he's proven wrong.)

After a moment of calming thoughts, he stands on his seat and looks around the cabin – if you could really call it that. It's difficult to see over the sea of heads or to hear over the hundreds of thousands of angry, raised voices, but from what he can tell it's a huge, mile-long stretch of seats that goes so far back, he can't spot the end. And naturally, it's working class. (Of  _course_  it is.) The seats are three-deep on either side and between the two aisles, and they're so cramped that adults have little-to-no legroom. At least he's directly in the middle aisle, which means no one's gonna bother him for his seat. Sometimes having the least desirable spot turns out to be the best thing that could have happened, even if it  _does_  mean that he's fenced in the whole journey.

(Good thing he's not claustrophobic.)

He turns and lowers himself back down onto his butt, reflexively tightening the chords on his hood in the hopes it might quiet down the din. Luckily for Kenny, he's not an adult, so he takes a moment to kick out short legs and wiggle his socked feet, finding pleasure in the lack of pain the movements cause.

Apparently he was one of the last dead to board, since the seatbelt signs over the aisles flicker on and pretty, large breasted flight attendants demonstrate with overt gestures how the passengers are expected to buckle themselves in. Kenny follows the order with no issue, completing it as quickly as possible so that he gets the pleasure of watching the bounce and sway of the nearest flight attendant's chest. (How is this a punishment of  _any_  kind?)

The captain gives some bogus greeting and lets them know that they're getting ready for lift off, so if everyone could ensure that they stay in their designated spot, the flight will go ahead as planned. Suffice it to say, everyone complies pretty fucking quickly.

Only moments later, the plane dips down into a crawling descent and Kenny lounges in his seat, shutting his eyes. Almost instantly, the air around them begins to shift from cool and sharp to something warm and stagnant. It's the sort of heat that builds up in shut-off rooms with poor airflow in the height summer. He knows from experience that the intensity of it will just keep on rising, until people are peeling off their layers and panting for cool air, for fresh water.

Their captain finishes off his long-winded announcement with the latest news about their upcoming arrival times, and apologizes that the air-conditioning system on board is faulty. Grown ass adults all around shout and stomp feet and throw their hands up in the air like they don't have all the time in the goddamn world, or like the sensation of overheating will somehow affect them negatively in the long run.

Even in death, as they're slowly consumed by the sensation of their organs cooking inside of them, Kenny's learned that almost all humans deserve it. To most, it doesn't even register that this is  _it_  for them. That they're dead, and they're at the mercy of higher powers for the rest of their unending existences. They're all still stuck in their own heads, expecting something new and magical to arise from their deaths. Apparently the concept of actually  _being_  dead takes a while for most humans to come to terms with. Stupid dicks.

Call Kenny a cynic, but he's of he opinion that the sooner they shut the fuck up and embrace their fates, the less drama they have to deal with. It's not like bitching's gonna get them anywhere.

So with the experience of the long dead, Kenny sinks back into his only  _mostly_  uncomfortable seat, ignores whoever's kicking the back of his chair and hogging his armrest, and he sinks back into himself.

Life is short and death is endless, an eternity of misery and monotony in which everyone partakes in equal measure. Once you figure out that there's no real concept of time in the Afterlife, it's easy to bend it to your will – or rather, to bend your will to  _it_.

When he's alive he's a child, with barely an echo of his dead-self's memories left in his fragmented mind. Like he'd told Pip on the playground a few months ago, trying to hold on to thoughts and feelings from the Afterlife is almost impossible, since the human brain just can't comprehend such big ideas – it's too small and simple. Because of that, whenever he's reborn, it's easy for him to sink back into the reality of his eight-year-old body. The physical encumbrance of neurological pathways and chemical reactions and hormones pumping through him dictates that living-Kenny is a kid.  _Just_  a kid. He's been alive for eight years and therefore he should think and feel a certain way.

Mostly, because it does weird things to his head to try and fight that, he doesn't. He's immature and silly and ignorant. The part of him that's mortal shoves the eternal bit of him into the very back of his mind to protect itself from further harm, and he carries on in some kind of bastardised fugue state. It's like he's sleep-walking: aware, but only semi-cognizant; alive, but almost entirely unseeing.

That's not the case, when he's dead.

In death, all fronts of Kenny's existence reunite. The mortal part of him – the earthbound child – merges with the soul that's experienced a thousand different deaths, has met long-dead figureheads, mass murderers, celebrities, mythical entities. He's walked through every inch of the Underworld, has visited Heaven, has spoken with God, has befriended Satan. He's still a kid, still struggles to realign that with his infinite knowledge, but he's  _more_  than that too. Kenny's gone through a horrific number of things that no other living person on Earth ever has or ever will. He's been split and re-sown so many times that his soul is a patchwork of awful, traumatic moments that shouldn't still fit together. As a single being, he shouldn't logically be able to function.

But knowledge is power.

Once he managed to realign his understanding of his existence, stuck as it is between a perpetual state of life and death – an unnatural, eternal flux of sin and suffering, wisdom and naivety – everything else was... easy to figure out.

Manipulating his concept of time in a place where it doesn't even exist (say, for instance, a long-ass flight into the seven layers of Hell with a huge number of irate, ignorant passengers) becomes frighteningly easy.

While it probably seems to stretch on for weeks for the other passengers, the journey takes Kenny only a matter of minutes, and a little extra mental power. He can rewire his brain to certain cues, like the engine of the imaginary plane roaring beneath him, and he can force himself to just disappear until the engine turns off. Like sleeping, and being woken by an alarm.

He shuts his eyes, concentrates on the shape of the simulated reality stretching around him – the hum of blood in his non-existent veins, the reflexive drive to breathe, the constant input of five senses he should no longer have - and he cuts his way through all of it. None of it exists apart from the thundering of the airplane.

No annoying wait times, no dead toddler wailing in row 147, no prissy teen whining about forgotten luggage two seats down. No moving, no speaking, no stink of too many bodies in an enclosed space or blood-boiling heat or aches in his unused lungs, just—

Nothing. Only pressure all around him, from every angle. The deafening clamor of the engine vibrating through his very soul until that's all there is. The suffocating rush of  _the Void—_

And then, the moment he feels like he might disintegrate under the weight of nonexistence and noise, might  _lose himself entirely_ —

It stops. The engine cuts off. The journey's over. The silence is all-consuming.

He grasps at his sense of reality. Sucks in huge, imagined lungfuls of recycled air and blinks the black spots from his vision as it all comes back to him. Kenny (that's his name, that's what it will always be) peers down at his small hands – hands of a child – and curls them into fists. Short nails bite into his palms, and he lets himself absorb the satisfying sting of it. His fake heart beats like a war drum, his body shakes with aftershocks, and it's so much sensation that were he alive, he's sure he would've blacked out. He wants to laugh, to jump on his seat and whoop, to cry and shout and run until everything hurts so much, he can't deny his existence.

(It's a rush, flirting with the Void – flirting with the idea of losing himself completely. It's the best high he'll ever get the taste of, and the most dangerous one too. He knows he's an idiot to manipulate that knowledge, but he can't help himself.)

Once he can hear over the rush of sensations and the hollering of a hundred-thousand other humans, he realizes that the captain is speaking.

"Now, ladies and gentleman, I'm sure that you will all be glad to hear that we've arrived. Once the lights above the aisles have switched off, please feel free to remove your seat belts and begin to disembark. Continue through the hallway to the designated check-in points, mind your step and do try not to fall prey to the Flighted Legions, as by all reports they are particularly soul-starved today." A twist of static. "This has been your descent into Hell with myself, King Paimon, as your ever gracious Captain. Thank you for your impatience, and I do hope that you enjoy your eternal unrest."

Stretching out a crick in his back and unbuckling his belt, Kenny pulls in his little limbs and lets the adults shove past him, pushing and complaining loudly about wait times and needing to cool down.

The air is still and blistering, running along his imagined extremities until he feels like his skin might peel off. Snorts loudly as he peers down at himself.

He always did find it amusing, how certain he is that the body he's in isn't real, but how unwilling he is to part with that familiarity. If he wanted, Kenny's pretty sure he could take the form of a well-endowed lady or a winged, horned beast, but... no matter how awesome either of those things would be, it'd feel wrong. He might not  _like_  being a scrawny, weak-ass child with a too-thin face and little nubbins for fingers and toes, but that's him. He's more comfortable in his skin than he'd be in anyone else's.

When they die, a lot of humanity don't seem to feel the same way. It might take them a while to learn just how flexible this new reality is, but once they do, most people make adjustments to themselves. Kenny thinks that's pretty cool. Especially when the  _really_  eccentric older spirits give themselves Medusa hair or extra sets of limbs, and they become almost impossible to tell apart from the  _actual_  demons and monsters.

He lets almost all the other passengers disembark ahead of him, and then he hops down onto his little socked feet. Despite the scorching temperature and his fake body's attempts to cool him down by sweating, he keeps his lumpy parker zipped up to his chin and his threadbare hood tight around his face.

As far back in the line as he is, there's only really the elderly and the youngest left on board, a number of which are being aided by various voluptuous flight attendants.

Unfortunately Kenny  _isn't_  elderly, infirm or too young to be able to make it outside by himself, and his pretty questionable moral code won't allow him to fake a need for assistance.

With a put upon sigh and a wishful gaze at some very perky lady-parts, he continues on through the aisles until they cross into standard white hallways. Some fair distance along the hallways, the ceiling opens up into a pitch-black crevasse and the bright paint chips and cracks, peeling back to reveal dark stone. UV lights switch out for flickering sconces and, every now and then, amber veins of lava run along the cracks and grooves in the walls and floor. There's only the endless echo of feet on stone, hushed voices, and the odd, eerie shriek of a demon lurking in the shadows.

A young kid cries some way behind him, and Kenny just sighs. A stink like sulphur and petrol burns away every other smell, scorching into the roof of his mouth and down the back of his throat. (It tastes like home.)

Eventually the dim, wavering light increases and the corridor widens into a cavern. In the center is a glorious pyre, crackling and soaring so high up into the chasm above them that winged demons can be seen circling overhead.

A huge row of tortured souls line the long walls like particularly tacky art, manacled to hang from their arms or legs or throats. There are wheels, cogs and chains draped around them. Loose sets of collars and cuffs dangle skeletons from the darkness overhead (which is all kinds of stupid in Kenny's opinion, since everyone here is  _already_  dead, so the skeletons are clearly not real). Some of the living prisoners are flayed to the bone and oozing, others covered in gruesome burn scars and contusions. One particularly memorable guy is hanging like a weird, broken doll, all of his limbs snapped at odd angles and his head turned back-to-front. The view would be terrifying, Kenny's sure, if it weren't for the fact that most of these people likely deserve this sort of fate. Murders, rapists, paedophiles. They'll be  _that_  ilk.

The ones who  _aren't_  probably just signed up for it out of their own free will. Kinky fucks. Still, Kenny's not about to shame them for enjoying this sorta thing even if it's not his  _personal_  idea of a good time. To each their own, as the saying goes.

(And besides that, once he gets a closer look at them, he can see that the majority of them are chatting with their neighbors in low voices, as if they've barely noticed they're trussed up like badly treated Christmas decorations.)

By the time the crowd's thinned out enough to see the checkpoints, he's almost upon them. (One of the downsides of being so short is that he can see absolutely fuck all.) Looking at them now, he can see that they're bland metal turnstiles with a high-tech eye scanner set in front of them. Each of the thirteen stations is manned by a human in a control booth full of blinking lights, monitors and dials.

All the shoving and the hysterical screaming has trickled to a crawl, and almost everyone's been funnelled away into various bland, dark tunnels ahead by the time he reaches a checkpoint. His turn brings him to a bored looking teen boy wearing black eyeliner and smoking an American spirit. The guy takes a long drag of his cigarette and waves his hand at the screen.

Having watched the last few people go through before him, Kenny knows to step up close, craning back his head so that the glowing machine can catch his eyes. After a few seconds the machine makes a trilling sound and a light above the turnstile flashes the number one at him.

"First District," the teen says around his cigarette, pressing a series of buttons and waving his hand a second time.

Pretty pleased with the sweet deal, Kenny pushes his way through the turnstile (he has to lean into it a little, since he's not exactly what he'd call  _strong_ ) and saunters between the few milling adults towards the corridor to First – marked similarly to the checkpoint by a flashing red number one.

Almost the second he steps through the arch into the tunnel beyond, the atmosphere shifts.

Like stepping into a completely different dimension, blessed cool air washes over his exposed cheekbones and the bridge of his nose. The stink of sulphur and gasoline fade out, leaving his mouth and nose numb. The lighting gradient is a soft yellow. A conveyor belt starts a few feet ahead of him, and the grey stone walls glitter with tiny flecks of burning embers. Every now and then down the length of the hallway there's what looks like an inspirational poster.

Kenny takes a moment to peer back over his thin shoulder at the archway he'd just walked through, and sees only blank wall.

Eyebrows climbing so high that they disappear into his hood, Kenny steps cautiously up onto the conveyor, reaching up to hold onto the handrail and turning this way and that to take in his surroundings. Has this place always existed, or is Satan just remodelling? First District's always been cushy, but  _this_  is just...

Sort of amusing.

At some point in his journey, elevator music begins to chime through the hallway – a quiet choir piece that Kenny feels he should probably know from church. (Unfortunately he doesn't pay all that much attention to the hymns since, y'know, God's a Mormon loving douchebag and all that.)

Suffice it to say, this is definitely  _not_  how dying usually goes.

(That tiny, hopeful voice in the back of his head pipes up before he can smother it.)

...

He's chilling in the park with Damien and the Mole, passing a joint back and forth between small, fumbling fingers. Every time he closes his eyes he sees rainbows.

"Dudes, you never think about going back?" he asks the question around a wheezing mouthful of steam. It tastes like a corpse but then Kenny thinks with a breathless giggle, he  _is_  one.

The Mole grunts, but otherwise ignores the question, reclining on the smoldering lawn with his arms behind his head, and shutting his eyes. Kenny follows that example.

"What? Where to?" Damien somehow still manages to seem angry and up himself, even when he's high as a kite. He also refuses to lay back in the charred black grass like the other boys, posture stiff.

"Earth. Duh," he says with a roll of his eyes. He takes another huge toke and then hands it back to the son of Satan.

"Insolent mortal," the other boy says, baring sharp teeth and staring down at him with flames dancing dramatically in his irises. Kenny can't tell if it's actually part of Damien's weird ass powers of if he's just so out of it he's hallucinating. "I have turned you into a platypus once before; I shall not hesitate to do such a thing again."

A snort. "Whatever. As if I couldn't just change back in a couple seconds, down here. Besides, it's hardly an invasive question man. Chill."

His Hellborn acquaintance just turns red enough to rival the lava lake behind his dad's holiday villa in Second District, and doesn't say anything useful. Knowing when he sees a lost cause, Kenny lets it slide.

(He bets Satan just won't let him visit until he's older. Sucker.)

...

Time may not exist down here in the Abyss, but Kenny knows instinctively that he's been gone longer than usual. He walks the streets and explores the shopping mall, lounges in the public square and generally enjoys the good life. Or, well, the good  _death_.

Out in the open streets he might feel like he's slowly frying alive and the food might all be spicy enough to have his eyes streaming, but he's got some semblance of normality back. He spends his days mostly chilling out with the Mole and the son of Satan, but every now and then he heads out on his own, poking his nose into strangers' houses and going places he's pretty sure he shouldn't be going.

The thing is, for all of his control over what he does inside the Afterlife once he's here, whatever it is that gave him his immortality also decides how he dies, and when he is revived. He's tried leaving for the living realm before he's meant to a few times, and the general result is that he turns into some kind of spiritual... residue. Like spilt soup on a white tablecloth. He gets stuck floating around, largely unnoticed; when someone  _does_  finally spot him, he's not much more than a badly CGI'd ghost from a tacky, uninspired horror movie.

Eventually, some higher being changes the metaphorical tablecloth and Kenny's shoved back into Hell, and he feels worse than ever. Sick, almost. Drained, like all the while he was in the wrong plane, he was fighting against the pull of the Void. That shit puts a strain on a soul, which is why spirits stuck in the living world either fade away real quick, or forget that they're stuck there. Think like in that movie, The Shining: after a while spirits go about their day-to-day lives, not even knowing that they're dead. Something fundamental about who they are goes  _wrong_.

So Kenny doesn't  _get_  a say in whether he gets to stay dead or come back, and he has no real ability to understand the patterns. He doesn't push his luck with it, either.

As a result, he struggles to keep tabs on the real world and their passage of time, and he begins to settle in. The separate parts of his personality – the mortal child and the immortal soul – begin to fuse further together the longer he's there. And he doesn't fight it, because it feels natural.  _Right_.

In Hell, with all of his hurts behind him and the ability to finally set aside his hopes and dreams for a normal life, Kenny embraces death in all of its glory.

He visits Satan and has in depth conversations about the big guy's latest hobbies (crocheting and pastry baking, specifically); listens to the Mole and Damien's vitriolic hatred for all things Heaven-related; tries new recreational drugs that temporarily lend him other souls' memories (it's fucking whacky); starts stealing the sort of alcohol that sets your insides on fire with just a sniff, from one of the high-end wine bars, and he gets sent off to the torture pits for five rounds of limb stretching when he's caught. All for formalities sake, really, since the bars don't actually make money and they never run out of stock. (The idea of a functional society after death is all that keeps people from jumping headlong into the Void, so a lazy justice system is considered better than nothing at all.)

Routine makes him feel at home. It helps to lull him into a sense of normality.

(He's never wanted something as much as he wants this.)

Which is why, when he's suddenly jolted out of his relaxation and forcefully shoved right back into the land of the living like he's being sucked up a straw, it's all so much worse.

It's  _agony_ , like he's being eaten alive – like he's being consumed.

(Probably, he'll think in retrospect, because he  _was_.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ilu guuuys <33


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